A blog by Mike aka Thog. I write. I game. I've never eaten a starfish.

Sunday, 1 May 2016

The Farmers Market

Near us, a Farmers Market takes place once a month, selling all kinds of fruit, vegetables, exotic meats (ostrich, anyone), cake, low fat sausages and so on. After popping in to see my parents (who are busy bottling home made alcohol - see my mum's blog), I decided to swing by the market to see if it was still on - I knew that it was due to finish early afternoon, but thought I might pick up a bargain going towards the end of the day.

No such luck.

Turning up at 1pm (and the market was due to last until 1pm) half of the stalls were already packed up whilst the other half, in the drizzle, desperately loaded vans and lorries as quickly as they could, seemingly to allow them to get the vehicle started and run over any remaining potential customers before they too left.

To make the visit worthwhile, I went to the toilet at the site, and then went and got a cheeseburger (yes, I washed my hands between the two events). I looked around for sauce to put on the cheeseburger, I couldn't see any but did notice a table behind two bikers that were stood next to the stand.

Making my way around the bikers (who almost seemed to be deliberately adjusting their standing positions to extend the amount of distance I would have to traverse to make it to the sauce), I picked up the mustard. The mustard bottle at first refused to dispense anything, but then reluctantly squeezed out a farting noise akin to a elderly Yorkshire Terrier that had eaten sprouts. Eventually it dribbled a stain of mustard onto the burger, and I accepted that this was as good as it was going to get, and retired to my car to escape the light rain and demolish the burger.

In other news, I've been playing with GIFs.

GIFs allow you to put up little animations (like the above), and are really useful to include in tweets to engage viewers, I got the idea from a recent "HootChat" run by Hootsuite - Hootsuite provide a really useful website where you can schedule tweets and the like, which I use because it means that I can promote my stuff when I'm at work etc, but they also do a great deal for helping people promote their stuff, through blog posts and HootChats on Twitter. The last one was on the use of video (and a lot around GIFs like the above, but also full videos) and was really interesting. Anyway, check out http://giphy.com/ , it lets you make GIFs.